Assunção Esteves promove reforma para melhorar leis

Article note: Deviam unificar as várias leis de direito de autor em Portugal. Não faz sentido a confusão atual.

O Parlamento inicia na próxima semana um projeto de “consolidação de leis” promovido pela presidente da Assembleia da República, que espera que a reforma melhore o acesso dos cidadãos à Justiça e a qualidade…

Police Visit Pirate Bay Proxy Owner’s Home Demanding a Shutdown

Article note: “No, this is my stand, we have to show companies that we will not get bullied into doing their bidding. Censorship is like a cancer, we must kill it before it spreads,” Tom says.

Brave kid! I hope it’s not all for nought.

Where can I donate for his defense?

It’s also refreshing to see the police as intimidation factor used by racketeering thugs.

“Comply with our demands, or else…” Nicely done.

I’d be calling for the head of the police commissioner on a silver plate, mind you.

pirate bayIt’s been a turbulent week in the UK with regard to anti-piracy initiatives.

It began with Internet provider Sky blocking access to Pirate Bay proxies, then the UK police sent out letters to torrent site owners threatening them with a 10 year prison sentence. This was followed by a backroom discussion between the Government, rightsholders and Google who explored options to de-list infringing sites.

On a smaller scale police and rightsholders carried out actions as well. Cooperating with the anti-piracy group FACT, local police visited the home of a local Pirate Bay proxy operator. While we’ve reported on similar actions against torrent site owners in the past, to our knowledge this is the first time that a proxy has been targeted.

After The Pirate Bay was blocked in the UK last year hundreds of proxies were launched, which are nothing more than a front for the regular Pirate Bay site. Running a proxy requires relatively few resources and one can be put online in a matter of minutes. But despite the easy setup they can also have serious consequences.

TorrentFreak talked to Tom, the operator of the PirateSniper proxy, who says he was visited by the police and anti-piracy group FACT for the second time recently, strengthening a message they delivered earlier.

“Two weeks ago I received a second knock on the door with the police standing on my doorstep. They had another letter and a further warning, ‘demanding’ that I shutdown PirateSniper.net before they take ‘criminal’ action against me,” Tom told TorrentFreak.

Tom was baffled by the surprise visit, to say the least. His proxy site has been active for a few months but has never been advertised and receives virtually no traffic. In addition, the site is not listed in Google’s search results.

“I cannot understand why I am a target. Yes, PirateSniper was recently removed from Google’s indexing list, but I can’t conceive the idea of police at my doorstep. Why?” Tom says.

In a pattern that fits with previous door knockings, the police were mainly there to assist FACT, who did most of the talking. According to Tom, FACT handed over some paperwork along with a warning that he could end up in jail if he continued operating the proxy.

“The police didn’t say much at all, they only asked me to confirm my identity then handed the conversation to a representative of the Federation Against Copyright Theft. It all happened quite suddenly and this time they were a little more aggressive than the first time they came.”

“They threatened me by saying things like ‘You could be sentenced to jail for a minimum of 4 years for the distribution of copyrighted material’. This time they were on a very personal level, not bothering with minor manners and such and just shoving information down my throat without any explanation whatsoever.”

Without receiving an ultimatum, Tom says he was asked to shut down the proxy, or else. The PirateSniper operator has contacted a solicitor and is prepared for the worst. However, the site will remain online for the time being.

“No, this is my stand, we have to show companies that we will not get bullied into doing their bidding. Censorship is like a cancer, we must kill it before it spreads,” Tom says.

Source: Police Visit Pirate Bay Proxy Owner’s Home Demanding a Shutdown

Police Visit Pirate Bay Proxy Owner’s Home Demanding a Shutdown

Article note: “No, this is my stand, we have to show companies that we will not get bullied into doing their bidding. Censorship is like a cancer, we must kill it before it spreads,” Tom says.

Brave kid! I hope it’s not all for nought.

Where can I donate for his defense?

It’s also refreshing to see the police as intimidation factor used by racketeering thugs.

“Comply with our demands, or else…” Nicely done.

I’d be calling for the head of the police commissioner on a silver plate, mind you.

pirate bayIt’s been a turbulent week in the UK with regard to anti-piracy initiatives.

It began with Internet provider Sky blocking access to Pirate Bay proxies, then the UK police sent out letters to torrent site owners threatening them with a 10 year prison sentence. This was followed by a backroom discussion between the Government, rightsholders and Google who explored options to de-list infringing sites.

On a smaller scale police and rightsholders carried out actions as well. Cooperating with the anti-piracy group FACT, local police visited the home of a local Pirate Bay proxy operator. While we’ve reported on similar actions against torrent site owners in the past, to our knowledge this is the first time that a proxy has been targeted.

After The Pirate Bay was blocked in the UK last year hundreds of proxies were launched, which are nothing more than a front for the regular Pirate Bay site. Running a proxy requires relatively few resources and one can be put online in a matter of minutes. But despite the easy setup they can also have serious consequences.

TorrentFreak talked to Tom, the operator of the PirateSniper proxy, who says he was visited by the police and anti-piracy group FACT for the second time recently, strengthening a message they delivered earlier.

“Two weeks ago I received a second knock on the door with the police standing on my doorstep. They had another letter and a further warning, ‘demanding’ that I shutdown PirateSniper.net before they take ‘criminal’ action against me,” Tom told TorrentFreak.

Tom was baffled by the surprise visit, to say the least. His proxy site has been active for a few months but has never been advertised and receives virtually no traffic. In addition, the site is not listed in Google’s search results.

“I cannot understand why I am a target. Yes, PirateSniper was recently removed from Google’s indexing list, but I can’t conceive the idea of police at my doorstep. Why?” Tom says.

In a pattern that fits with previous door knockings, the police were mainly there to assist FACT, who did most of the talking. According to Tom, FACT handed over some paperwork along with a warning that he could end up in jail if he continued operating the proxy.

“The police didn’t say much at all, they only asked me to confirm my identity then handed the conversation to a representative of the Federation Against Copyright Theft. It all happened quite suddenly and this time they were a little more aggressive than the first time they came.”

“They threatened me by saying things like ‘You could be sentenced to jail for a minimum of 4 years for the distribution of copyrighted material’. This time they were on a very personal level, not bothering with minor manners and such and just shoving information down my throat without any explanation whatsoever.”

Without receiving an ultimatum, Tom says he was asked to shut down the proxy, or else. The PirateSniper operator has contacted a solicitor and is prepared for the worst. However, the site will remain online for the time being.

“No, this is my stand, we have to show companies that we will not get bullied into doing their bidding. Censorship is like a cancer, we must kill it before it spreads,” Tom says.

Source: Police Visit Pirate Bay Proxy Owner’s Home Demanding a Shutdown

U.N. Realizes Internet Surveillance Chills Free Speech

Article note: Now, there’s a bunch of Sherlocks! Now what?

An anonymous reader writes “The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the United Nations has finally come to the realization that there is a direct relationship between government surveillance online and citizens’ freedom of expression. The report (PDF) says, ‘The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of the right to freedom of expression. Undue interference with individuals’ privacy can both directly and indirectly limit the free development and exchange of ideas. An infringement upon one right can be both the cause and consequence of an infringement upon the other.’ The EFF adds, ‘La Rue’s landmark report could not come at a better time. The explosion of online expression we’ve seen in the past decade is now being followed by an explosion of communications surveillance. For many, the Internet and mobile telephony are no longer platforms where private communication is shielded from governments knowing when, where, and with whom a communication has occurred.'”

Share on Google+

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.N. Realizes Internet Surveillance Chills Free Speech

Article note: Now, there’s a bunch of Sherlocks! Now what?

An anonymous reader writes “The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the United Nations has finally come to the realization that there is a direct relationship between government surveillance online and citizens’ freedom of expression. The report (PDF) says, ‘The right to privacy is often understood as an essential requirement for the realization of the right to freedom of expression. Undue interference with individuals’ privacy can both directly and indirectly limit the free development and exchange of ideas. An infringement upon one right can be both the cause and consequence of an infringement upon the other.’ The EFF adds, ‘La Rue’s landmark report could not come at a better time. The explosion of online expression we’ve seen in the past decade is now being followed by an explosion of communications surveillance. For many, the Internet and mobile telephony are no longer platforms where private communication is shielded from governments knowing when, where, and with whom a communication has occurred.'”

Share on Google+

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fixing the FirefoxOS default search provider

WTF? FirefoxOS uses Bing as default search provider?

Yuck, I must fix that. Finally after almost a week I have had some time for me and that’s the first thing I must fix. Thanks to the very helpful comment from Mathieu in this blog post, I wrote a very small shell script that replaces the search provider to your favorite one, defaulting to Google.

It uses sudo for the privileged commands but doesn’t need to completely run as root. Its your choice, run ./fix-ffos-search-provider.sh or sudo ./fix-ffos-search-provider.sh taking as optional arguments (in this order), the Title, the URL and it’s Favicon url. Miss one and the Google default will be used 🙂 eg:

./fix-ffos-search-provider.sh \
  "Duck Duck Go" https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/favicon.ico

First, it sets the options, then starts adb-server and fetches the browser application (note that you need the android-tools package in Fedora or the Android SDK):

#!/bin/sh

TITLE=${1:-Google}
URL=${2:-www.google.com/m}
ICO=${3:-https://www.google.com/favicon.ico}

sudo adb start-server

sudo adb pull \
  /system/b2g/webapps/browser.gaiamobile.org/application.zip
sudo chown $USER:$GROUP application.zip

mkdir application
cd application/
unzip ../application.zip

Then, it does the magic with the help of Perl:

perl -pi -e " \
    s|(DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_URL: ?)'.*?'|\$1'$URL'|; \
    s|(DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_TITLE: ?)'.*?'|\$1'$TITLE'|; \
    s|(DEFAULT_SEARCH_PROVIDER_ICON: ?)'.*?'|\$1'$URL'|; \
    " js/browser.js gaia_build_defer_index.js

Finally, it rebuilds the browser application and pushes it back to the phone and reboots it (it shouldn’t need a reboot, maybe there’s a way to avoid this?):

zip -fr ../application.zip .
cd ..

sudo adb remount
sudo adb push application.zip \
   /system/b2g/webapps/browser.gaiamobile.org/application.zip
sudo adb reboot

So, here it is, finally fixed 🙂 Well, temporarily (it will be better fixed following the results of https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/9454 and https://github.com/gasolin/gaia/commit/47072a825d9e7c2859f4f8de4fb200cc7450e10b or something similar) at least.

Screenshot of FirefoxOS browser googling for 'test'
Googling for ‘test’


CC0
To the extent possible under law, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Fix FirefoxOS Default Search Provider. This work is published from Portugal.